Last modified: Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Five from IU Bloomington elected 2010 fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Jan. 11, 2011
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Four biologists and a political scientist from Indiana University Bloomington are among this year's 503 elected fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world's largest general scientific society.
Biologists Lynda Delph, Roger Hangarter, Roger Innes and Rudy Raff and political scientist Edward Carmines join IU's 29 previously elected fellows. The five will be recognized for their contributions to science and technology at the Fellows Forum to be held on Feb. 19, 2011, during the AAAS annual meeting in Washington, D.C. The 2010 class ties a single-year record for IU Bloomington's biology department, which now has a total of 19 AAAS fellows, including last year's electee, distinguished professor of biology Ellen Ketterson.
"These honors point to the extremely high quality of our faculty," said electee Roger Innes, chair of the Biology Department. "We now have 14 active AAAS fellows, which is nearly 25 percent of the current Biology Department faculty."
The departments of Biology and Political Science are both divisions of the College of Arts and Sciences at IU Bloomington.
Edward Carmines is the Rudy Professor of Political Science and Warner O. Chapman Professor of Political Science. With James Stimson, he is the coauthor of Issue Evolution: Race and the Transformation of American Politics, a seminal work that used race issues to explicate political and social change in post-World War II America. Carmines directs the Center on American Politics and is the research director at the Center on Congress at Indiana University.
Lynda Delph, a professor of biology, is an evolutionary ecologist who works on plants with separate sexes. Her investigations of the flowering plant Silene latifolia have demonstrated how evolutionary pressures can drive differences between the sexes, and how genes and gene relationships can constrain the evolution of sexual dimorphism. Delph, also a dedicated educator, is the biology department's associate chair for teaching and director of undergraduate studies.
Roger Hangarter, Class of 1968 Chancellor's Professor of Biology, studies the genetic, molecular, and physiological processes that drive plants' responses to environmental stimuli, particularly light. His public outreach project, Plants-in-Motion (https://plantsinmotion.bio.indiana.edu/plantmotion/starthere.html), has won numerous accolades and awards. Hangarter was president of the American Society of Plant Biologists in 2003.
Roger Innes, professor and chair of Biology, studies the immune system of plants, with a focus on how plants detect pathogens. Work by Innes and his lab members led to the discovery of specific plant genes that mediate pathogen recognition. Analyses of these genes revealed that they functioned analogous to a central alarm system in which pathogens were being sensed by the damage they caused inside the cell, rather than by direct detection. This was an unexpected finding that is now providing new insights into the immune system of humans.
Distinguished Professor of Biology Rudy Raff is credited with co-founding evolutionary developmental biology, or "evo devo," a field that examines the importance of developmental processes in the evolution of species. Among his projects, he is studying differences in development in two closely related sea urchins, and is contributing to an ongoing investigation of the fossilization of marine animal soft tissue, once thought unlikely -- even impossible. Raff is the James H. Rudy Professor of Biology and the director of the Indiana Molecular Biology Institute.
The American Association for the Advancement of Science is the publisher of the journal Science. AAAS was founded in 1848, and includes some 262 affiliated societies and academies of science, serving 10 million individuals.
To speak with any of the newly elected fellows, please contact David Bricker, University Communications, at 812-856-9035 or brickerd@indiana.edu.
